How should the industry deal with ETF interlopers?

ETFs

Anthony Christodoulou and Sebastian da Cunha of WorldTrack examine the disruption caused by exchange-traded funds in the UK and the part they are playing in the current market.

In the 1960s, IBM was the dominant player in the corporate mainframe computer market. Their sophisticated machines offered unrivalled processing power, putting them far ahead of their competitors. In the meantime, companies like DEC and Hewlett-Packard developed simpler minicomputers that responded to the needs of engineers with less demanding computing power, enabling them to solve problems for themselves. These minicomputers were much cheaper and at first less profitable than IBM’s mainframes, which is precisely why the company initially chose to ignore them. This short-sighted v...